


Ad Misericordiam

by hitlikehammers



Series: Risorgimento [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: And These Are The Consequences, Angst, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky Could Never Deny Steve a Damned Thing, Dream Sharing, Dreams vs. Reality, Emotional Instability, Except He's So Damned Lost It Doesn't Matter, Guilt-Ridden Steve, Identity Issues, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers Feels, Though Eventually Said Angst Will Be Resolved With a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-23 06:55:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4867373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Don’t fight them, Buck,</i> Steve had said in the dream, in the ice, in the void: Steve had <span class="u">begged</span>. <i>If it hurts, if they just dig deeper, if they just try to take more and it doesn’t do any good, you’ve gotta stop.</i></p><p><i>Don’t let them hollow this out,</i> and Bucky touches his chest just like Steve does in the memory, feels the heart that betrays him: there and not there. His and not his.</p><p>“I need <i>him</i>, but they’ll take me, they’ll wipe me out so I have to hide, I have to go deeper, and deeper, else I’ll burn, I’ll drown, and when he comes, he’s going to <i>come</i>—”</p><p>Bucky’s lungs forget how air fits inside them, just then, as the worst comes to mind:</p><p>“But what if he gave up?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ad Misericordiam

**Author's Note:**

> And here's what [ Requiēscat](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4813799) was meant to bridge _to_. 
> 
> This is a farewell gift to myself as I prepare to move very far away, and packing is getting on the last of my nerves/psychiatric meds. Etc. etc. yay.

Cold.

You’d think it would be cold, but it burns.

He finds himself; it finds itself, he finds itself, he—

There is a pounding in his chest that feels—that _feels_ —and there are no words. Words, for missions, parameters, to instruct, to follow, to execute to—

It is loud, it is very loud, and the pounding is the promise of lightning through the dark except there is no dark, there are lights everywhere, and he’s dizzy: he’s been lost before, he’s been alone before but there’d never been such a sense of undoing, of unmaking, of the cells of his body settling flame to themselves, parched, curling, crying out as they shrivel and come to dust and he is dust but he is burning, he is dust and he is aching, he is dust and he is less than dust because dust is a thing and he is less than a thing he is—

He cannot breathe. There is only fire as he stumbles—fire in the snow and fire in the sky and fire as it falls into the water; there is _fire_ ; there is only the acrid, vile reek of ends as he claws for what it means to see and know a single goddamned thing: the screech of metal bending brick and mortar to its will except there is no will; the wheeze of something that may have been lungs, long ago, longer than bodies should be and ice should last and hearts should beat and he knows this, he knows this, the pounding is his heart and his heart is on _fire_ —

There is still a corner of his mind that finds the hooks terrifying, that can barely be heard above the calculation, the competence ingrained with blade depth and laser precision and yet the corner speaks in the cadence of his pulse and it is known in the now, and so little is truly _known_ that he balks, that he wretches for nothing and trips past the hides, the flesh, the meat of what life means at its core when it’s done and the scent of blood is a comfort save that he knows no comfort, there is no comfort; save that the blood that lives in the air he can’t breathe is miasmic, is a toxin and it poisons his own veins and he’s dropping to his knees and he’s gagging on the fact of his own being, on the pulsing of the heart that _hurts_ where it never could before, where it never _felt_ before except that isn’t true, that isn’t _true_ , he’s not an it, he’s not an _it_ —

The red beneath his nails is a benediction and a crime, it is a spiral to the seven circles of a place he knows but doesn’t know except for fire, except for returning to that from whence he came: he knows it’s hopeless. He knows he’s bent beyond repair. It is so loud. It is so bright.

He almost doesn’t realize it, when he comes upon it. He almost doesn’t notice, because it’s not the shape he knows.

He almost overlooks it, because it can’t be so. 

It isn’t a tube. There are no restraints. He can barely heft open the latch to the door, can barely help but to fall beyond the threshold when the waft of air for breathing, for stopping, for stilling and making numb hits him hard and fast: he gasps, he collapses—his leg catches in the path of the closing hatch and it is only muscle memory that has him curling in upon himself: it is only what has preceded him that tells him the impact should hurt; that the door will slam.

He starts to shiver before the cold penetrates his limbs: his heart is pounding long after it should have stopped entirely, but it is cold. It is dark. 

It stays loud until there is nothing, but he’ll take it.

He will take it, and be grateful. 

___________________________________

It’s familiar, but it isn’t known—it isn’t a thing that he’s _known_ before, when he finds it, when he finds himself there, here: it’s dark and prismatic, it’s murky and shadowed and cold, but stifling: not for heat so much as for weight. It’s oppressive. He’s drowning.

It is cold. There is only ice.

He still cannot breathe.

And then it comes to him, instantaneous: this place is a palace built upon a hope that has caved beneath loss and he is frozen, his flesh is a prison of the ice itself because all he can do is sob, all he can do is shake and he is coated in the frost of his own sorrow, he is immobilized by his own wretched wanting, his own solitude in the cold.

And he remembers what it feels like to scream, to claw: he remembers needing and thrashing blindly for the beat of a heart that had escaped him, had abandoned him, had found better as it deserved and yet stole his own heart’s rhythm in falling away. He remembers touch, and warmth as a foreign thing, a thing more from a dream than the brush of skin, but he remembers tastes that aren’t bitter, aren’t sour or burnt: he remembers sweetness, he remembers breath on his skin before the cold and he wants to sob because his chest is too tight, because his ribs are too brittle, frozen over and his blood can’t pump and his lungs can’t fill and he is alone, he is alone and he hurts, and he—

“Bucky?”

In that moment, in that space, in that despair: in the breath that can’t be taken, not yet, that voice is the very voice of God.

“Oh my god,” and the voice is balm and beauty; the voice is the blood that can’t move but it’ll move, it’ll find a way to move because it only moves for this for _him_ —

“Oh my god, Buck,” and the sensation is strange, at first, until he realizes, until he is _Bucky_ and he _realizes_ that the touch that steels him and makes him weak, that is so close to breaking the still that consumes him: he realizes that he is Bucky, and the world revolves around those hands upon his skin and he can almost feel again beyond what builds and bleeds in his chest—he can almost feel on the outside, and the ice may never melt but it can give, it can thin, and he thinks he could move, or maybe fly, if only the touch never left.

“Buck, please,” the voice begs, his god implores, and he feels brightness, if brightness can in fact be felt—he knows color, and calm, for the presence of blue bearing down upon his soul. 

“Please, please, don’t be,” and it takes space he should fill with his own breaths to see, to know what tears look like when they flow, when they _live_ as they fall down that perfect, precious, long-beloved and long-bereft face. The hands slip from his cheeks to his neck, seeking: “ _Please_ don’t be—”

You’d think it would be cold, amidst the crystal, amidst the darkness that reflects frigid without end, but it isn’t.

He breathes—he gasps.

It _burns_.

“Oh, thank god,” and the vision of all that makes a man, all that saves a soul: he shakes, and he sobs, and he takes Bucky into his arms and holds him close and Bucky remembers, suddenly, what it feels like to be warm, what fire means when it doesn’t aim to kill. “Oh, fuck, Bucky, I thought, I thought…”

And Bucky cannot help himself in the moment, in the instant: with the weight of so much time, and so much loss, and the exhaustion, the constant struggle—of knowing and trying so hard to forget, of warring endless with what they’ve made and what they’ve left, with a promise pitched against a need; Bucky cannot help himself when faced with the broad span of that chest pressed tight to his body. Bucky’s heart cannot help itself but to learn, to recall again the cadence of the heart he’s held to—to remember what it means to want to live.

It’s a pipe dream, he knows this, but he’s tired. He’s weak.

He can’t _help_ it. 

“Bucky?” The figment is so real; the projection so complete. He sounds like Steve. The echo of his voice around his heart is Steve’s.

Bucky remembers what it means to cry tears that can fall.

“Have you, is this…” the vision trails off, stares around them at the glimmering, shimmering nothing, because that is what it is: it is nothing. 

It is nothing without a heart. Without a soul that is shared and Bucky’s was torn from him; Bucky wonders if he even remembers what it looked like, what it felt like. Wonders if this is Steve to his mind in even the softest, gentlest, vaguest sense just because he’s desperate. Just because it’s too damned _much_.

He makes himself ease back. He forces himself to break the growing sense of vibrant heat that threatens to melt all that holds his shards together. He cannot give in.

He promised.

“Buck?” The vision looks confused. The expression is just right. 

It hurts to say it out loud; to break the spell indefinitely.

“You’re a lie.”

And oh, _oh_ , but he remembers heartbreak. He remembers tricky hearts and tired lungs, he remembers why the handlers were never a thing to be afraid of because he remembers fear, real fear, and he remembers what it's meant all this time to feel fear known, to take shape and take root in every piece of him: loss. 

He could have done without remembering heartbreak. 

Save that he thinks if he's made of anything, and more, it is heartbreak. 

“You’re a lie," Bucky's voice is a scratch, a rusty nail; it bleeds. "It’s a lie." 

Good god, but it bleeds. 

“Why are you here?”

The face of all that he wants and all that's not real—that's _never_ real—drops, goes blank: lost. 

Always lost. 

“If you think you can take this,” Bucky grinds out, and it’s barely a sound for the withered threads of his vocal cords, and if his hands go to his chest unbidden, he cannot help it, he will not help it. 

“If you’ve finally found a way to break this too, then do it.”

He can't find it in himself to fear, to pull from their reach: they own all but this. They cannot touch this. They hold the ice. They bring the ice. 

But he _is_ the ice. 

And the spectre they taunt him with, they break him with without knowing he cannot be broken, there is nothing left to break: the spectre that feigns home, that mirrors his heart and therefore has to be untrue because his heart is still frozen, his heart killed itself for aching so very long ago: the spectre watches him like it knows what hurt means, but cannot grasp.

It’s okay. Bucky can grasp for them both.

“If you haven’t, if you still can’t,” Bucky asks, and there’s nothing in his voice: he is hollow, and the truth that no one speaks is that the hollow can still cut. “If you still can’t take this, then why are you here?”

The face contorts: all wrongness, all well-known, all long-lost. Bucky could fucking choke on the way that nostalgia; that need in its purest form rises up to destroy him.

“Bucky, what are you saying?” The voice is cracking. The voice wants, too, and maybe that’s their angle. Maybe that’s the way they plan to coax him out, but he holds firm, curls in upon himself and seeks whatever place, whatever nook or cranny he’s overlooked before and can find to hide in deeper. Deeper.

Deeper still.

“I promised,” Bucky shakes his head, coughs around his breath: he doesn’t know why he bothers, doesn’t know why he gives them the satisfaction, but there is some relief to it, to the words. There is some merit in reminding himself why he holds, why he fights them off but only them, and only here: there is merit in reminding himself why he lets the Beast live with his face.

“I promised, I,” he swallows, and loses himself to memory: to a roach-filled tenement and to a tiny-perfect chest and to the only will, the only world that mattered, housed inside. To the way it felt to leave a heart behind when you crossed an ocean, and how the thought of reuniting with the feel of it warm beneath your breast again was enough to make it easy to pull a trigger and breath another day. The way strong arms felt around weary shoulders, and the way that wind felt with the fall. The way a heart feels when it stops, the way the cold seeps through even steel, the way a question sounds when it echos off of ice, and the same with a moan: the way two hearts know how to beat against one another in the comedown, brought together, tied eternal.

 _Don’t fight them, Buck,_ Steve had said, Steve had begged. _If it hurts, if they just dig deeper, if they just try to take more and it doesn’t do any good, you’ve gotta stop._

 _Don’t let them hollow this out,_ and Bucky touches his chest just like Steve does in the memory, feels the heart that betrays him: there and not there. His and not his.

Flayed, yet not dead. 

_Whatever it takes, however far you have to hide it, keep this, keep us,_ and he remembers Steve’s hands, remembers the feel of him: inside. Everywhere.

There’s a word for it that they burned from him: a failing. But the way it burns in kind was too strong; wouldn’t go.

The pull is still there. The word doesn’t matter.

 _The world can’t lose you, James Barnes,_ and those words had been drenched in that pull, in that light: _I can’t lose you._

And Bucky had _promised_.

“Whatever it takes,” Bucky whispers, repeats it like a mantra, a prayer: “whatever it takes to survive, but it hurts,” and it’s foolish, it’s a gambit with death to confess it, to own yet another weakness to the enemy but the face is so dear, and Bucky _wants_ so _much_.

“Oh god, it hurts,” Bucky gasps, and the tears fall: hot. Hot like they haven’t been since there was Steve, and maybe he can delude himself. Maybe he can pretend this is real. His Steve.

“It’s been so long, it’s so _long_ —”

“Oh,” and Bucky looks up, and sees the face: the face that was blank and was lost now dawning in recognition, the sun on the last of all earthly days because it cracks down the middle in an instant, horrified, and Bucky understands that, Bucky understands horror at the sight of what he is, what he’s done, what he’s _become_ —

“Oh god,” and it could be Steve, it could: it isn’t, but it sounds like him, sounds like its heart spilling forth and Bucky wants to taste it, Bucky is foolish and he wants to drink from a fountain of youth and eat from a tree of knowledge and live and die forever all at once, even if it means believing a lie as Steve moans, breaking slow as he gazes on Bucky in disbelief, in absolute dismay: “Oh, _god_...”

Bucky leans, and he doesn’t think before he presses lips to Steve’s: hard and fast and fearful that the illusion will slip and the evil that hunts him: the demons who hunt the monster itself—they’ll reveal their true forms. The mask will slip and even Bucky won’t be able to imagine Steve back into this place where he’s needed, where he’s wanted, where he is everything and all. 

And whatever this is, whoever this is, wherever they are and have ever been in this cave of shadowplay and no promise of spring: Steve’s taste is a key in the door of Bucky’s mind, and it restores depth to his world and oh but he can’t, he _can’t_.

He pulls back, and the mouth he needs beneath his own gapes at him, and there it is again: heartbreak.

The common denominator.

“Bucky, please,” this Steve, this echo: he pleads, and it’s so real, so _real_. “Please, look at me, come on, we can—”

“No,” Bucky shies, pulls back and hugs himself close to stay safe, he has to stay safe. “No. He said he needs me,” Bucky nods to himself. “He needs me,” and yet, so much more than that:

“I need _him_.”

Steve’s face is twisted with conflict, with all that he cannot understand and does not want to see and that’s not Steve.

Bucky tries to convince himself that Steve would never wish not to see _him_.

“Deeper,” Bucky mutters, screws shut his eyes. “Deeper where he can’t find me, but he’s going to find me,” and the ice in his throat, on his tongue is all but gone and the quiet isn’t a comfort, not to him, not to his soul.

“They’ll take me, they’ll wipe me out, they’ll take the lightning and rip through me like sand and I’ll burn, I’ll drown, and when he comes, he’s going to _come_ —”

Bucky’s lungs forget how air fits inside them, just then, as the worst comes to mind; as a hand reaches for his arm—so gentle, so soft—and Bucky meets those blue eyes again without meaning to, without warning as he gasps, unthinkable:

“But what if he gave up?”

He watches the face, that _face_ go slack, that mouth open to speak but he can’t let it, he can’t, his heart is pounding, he can’t focus, the darkness is too _bright_.

“I don’t know the way back,” Bucky stammers. “I can’t find the way back home, he has to show me and what if I’m too far gone, what if I went too deep and he tried, or what if he didn’t even try because all he saw was what was left up there and, and,” his voice cracks, but he is ice, he is winter: the pieces freeze as they always have but this time it sears, this time it strikes fear and death into the very center of his being as he hisses out:

“The monster,” he shudders. “The monster that’s _me_. I should have fought,” he sobs, he shakes; “but I couldn’t, I _couldn’t_...”

His eyes stream, and they plead to the man before him for mercy, whoever he is: whatever about him is real.

“I couldn’t,” Bucky whispers. “He said to stop. He said…” he chokes on his own failings, his own needing, his own lack of control as he reaches, reaches and can’t stop the need to believe in one thing, just one thing: 

“Steve,” he gasps, clawing at the warm chest in from of him: “ _Steve_.”

“Buck,” and there is realization, there is heartache, there is overwhelming _feeling_ in that voice, in those arms as they wrap around him tight and keep him, warm him, soothe him even though he is so far beyond soothing, beyond saving. “Buck, I,” and that chest heaves beneath Bucky’s cheek, that heart trembles like his own trembles because it is his own, and this is Steve, it could be Steve, it isn’t Steve, it’s never Steve. 

The heart beneath him trembles as his own heart trembles, and his body follows. He couldn’t stop it if he tried.

“I’m sorry,” the voice breathes—Steve’s voice, it sounds so much like Steve, it warms his blood like only Steve can. “I did this, it was me,” and there is sorrow in the voice, there is guilt and remorse and horror at wrongs that Bucky can’t abide as Steve laments, as Steve shakes: “I never thought, I never _dreamt_...”

And if Bucky closes his eyes and gives into dreams long dead, it _is_ Steve. Miracles happen, and there is a merciful god and after all of this time there is Steve, and Steve is breathing, and Steve is living, and Steve is here, with him.

Bucky cannot keep his eyes closed forever, though, and when he opens them, the illusion shatters, because the world is not kind, and fate does not favor him, and the sob that rises in his throat could slay armies with the way it wracks and howls.

“But I remembered,” Bucky gasps, holds a palm between their chests because just because he doesn’t believe that it’s Steve beside him doesn’t mean that the comfort of another body wholly dies. “What was in here, I remembered,” and he can feel heartbeats on either side of his hand, clawing in their own way; desperate on their own terms.

“I kept this safe. I kept it safe, I kept him safe in here because he is all of it, he is everything, I remembered,” Bucky chokes, and the power in him fades. 

“I _remember_.” And it’s a whisper as he drops his head to Steve’s quivering chest and breathes:

“For _him_.”

“Bucky—”

“I promised,” Bucky shakes his head, tangles his hair against the strong chest beneath him. “He promised, and I promised.” He slumps, then; drags down the warm torso and submits himself again to the cold:

“He _promised_.”

And oh, but the hand that holds his head, that curls around a shoulder and pulls him in closer is maddening, is resurrection and damnation all at once.

“God, Buck, oh, Christ,” and Bucky focuses on what it sounds like when Steve’s lungs crackle around hurting and his heart trips around his own faults that aren’t faults, aren’t his _fault_ : Bucky sinks into this memory made manifest to torment him and lets it blanket him instead, just a little while longer.

“Please, please believe me, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry,” Steve’s voice is breaking, wreathed in the tears Bucky can feel on the top of his head. “I’m so sorry, I left you, I let you fall, I didn’t come find you, I never thought, I couldn’t, I…” Steve gasps, sucks in air with a certain desperation that Bucky knows intimately before he rasps:

“God, Bucky, baby, I’m—”

“Stop it!” 

Because that’s the breaking point, the tipping point. This isn’t Steve. Tenderness and remorse are not for him, not here, and miracles do not happen. The universe is not benevolent. Bucky has been waiting for so long, and he cannot give up now, he cannot give in now, this is a trick, this is a lie, they are trying to take him again and he will not fail Steve.

Not again.

“Stop it, stop it, please,” he hisses, but it turns to a moan halfway through. “Please,” he gasps, and drops away from the hold of this man, this facade as he curls in on himself and screw shut his eyes once more.

“You can’t take me. I told him, I told him I wouldn’t let you take me, I wouldn’t let them take me,” and it’s true, and it’s the only thing he has left: that promise. It’s the only thing that brings him back, and keeps him battered and broken but _here_.

“I love him,” and that’s the word they took, he knows it; that’s the word that fits the feeling, the pull, and then transcends it into light. “I love him, and he’s coming for me,” Bucky nods to himself and pulls himself inward; tighter. 

“He’s coming for me, he’s coming and he’ll put the broken parts back together, he said, he said...” 

Bucky chokes, and the darkness behind his eyes starts to flicker, to fade, to shine.

“He’s coming for me. You’re coming for me, Stevie,” he murmurs, drifts. “You came before. You’ll come.”

And if it’s a prayer, it’s only to Steve. Steve is all that Bucky can believe in, anymore.

“He’ll _come_.”

___________________________________

He snaps to consciousness: blinks. Remembers pieces. Enough pieces to know there is something in him that is wild, and broken, but very much alive.

 _He_ is in him, and is wild. Broken.

But he _breathes_.

It’s the shift of light, of air, of sound that brings him awake: the meat locker he’d collapsed into cycling to maintain the chill.

There are things he has to find. There are things he has to do.

His heart pounds, and there’s feeling to it. There is an ache he recognizes and a name that goes with a man on a bridge and a man in his dreams and a man who is his whole soul.

_You’re my whole goddamned world._

Above everything else, that is a thing that he _knows_.

___________________________________

“You’re a stubborn sonuvabitch, y’know that?”

Steve groans as he comes to, and turns slow, mindful of the way it stings, to see Sam’s expression.

Sam is not impressed.

“Had to sedate your ass into a medicated coma so you wouldn’t keep setting back the healing process after you _got yourself shot up and fell from a burning aircraft and then nearly drowned_.” Sam huffs, crossing his arms over his chest. “It’s a fucking marvel that serum ever worked on you at all, Rogers. The fact that you didn’t stand up and tell it to fuck off and let you do your own thing astounds me. Truly.”

Steve’s head is still too fuzzy to appreciate Sam’s biting sarcasm.

Steve’s heart is still too heavy, too full with his dreams.

“You alright?” Sam’s voice shifts, concern clear in the tone, and Steve only then realizes the pitchy squeal of the ECG beside him, betraying the way he aches for more than his body’s harms.

“Sam,” Steve rasps, tries to breathe deep to calm the beating of his heart, if not the feeling in it. Sam leans in, gaze serious: gauging the gravity of what Steve’s about to say. 

“Do you think dreams mean anything?”

Sam blinks, and hides his confusion well.

“Why do you ask?”

Steve swallows. It aches. He blinks, and sees ice.

“How long until I can get out of here?” he asks, and Sam rolls his eyes, and maybe dreams mean nothing. Maybe it’s wishful thinking.

But the feel of Bucky in his arms was undeniable. The glow of that place was inescapable, the same as it ever was only darker. Deeper. And Steve has asked the impossible, Steve had begged the unthinkable.

And Bucky hadn’t ever denied Steve, not once.

Maybe dreams mean _everything_. Steve won’t risk it, either way.

Not again.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).


End file.
